Last week we looked at how a sane sexual ethic,
unhinged from the Catholic tradition, decays. The Christian revelation teaches
us that sexual relations between two consenting married heterosexual adult
human beings not related already by blood are not just good but, among the
baptized, sacramental.

Rejecting the faith, our culture has assumed that Christian
sexual morality would simply continue by custom. Instead, our enshrinement of
consent as the sole criterion of the good has meant the embrace of fornication,
no-fault divorce and, most recently, same-sex “marriage.”

But
when you make consent the sole criterion of the good, as our culture already
has, there’s no particular reason to stop there. As the popularity of shows
like “Big Love” demonstrates, our manufacturers of culture are already pressing
hard on the “taboo” concerning the number “two.” So long as everybody is
consenting, then why not celebrate polygamy, as well? That’s “Big Love,”
whereas narrow, crabbed Christianity is all about small love, don’t cha know.

After
this comes the whole “not related by blood” thing. Indeed, as some warm and
sympathetic news stories have already shown, the campaign to legitimate incest
needs only some sobbing HBO movie or Oprah interview to make the case for it in
pop culture. If a brother and sister truly love each
other (the argument goes), what business does cold-hearted society have
interfering in a matter of consent between individuals? As one commenter on a
recent incest story in the British press put it: “Good on them! This story
highlights the absurd and arbitrary moralizing taboos that our society likes to
construct around sexual relations.”

Once
again, we see the triumph of the notion that consent is the sole criterion of
the good.

But
wait! We’re not done! Since, in our post-Christian culture, consent is the sole
criterion of the good and there is no reference to be made at all to the common
good, it follows that other “taboos” must go, too.

Who
says that sex between consenting adult human beings is all that’s good
and beautiful? What about sex between consenting human beings whose souls are
tragically separated by the accident of mere age differences?

The
North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)makes
exactly the same “consent is the sole criterion of the good” arguments that all
these other revolutionaries are making against the Church’s understanding of
the Common Good. And a culture that already grants the premise that consent
between two people who love each is all that matters is in no position at all
to make an argument that NAMBLA is wrong. All it can do is say “Eww!” — as it
once said to homosexual acts.

But
“Eww!” is not an argument. It’s an aesthetic judgment. And aesthetic
judgments are no basis for a nation’s laws, as our media advocates of same-sex
“marriage” remind us every day. So, if we are going to accept the premise that
consent alone is all that matters, we will
someday have to make room for star-crossed lovers like Mary Kay Letourneau and
Vili Fualaau, the teacher and sixth-grade student who found “true love,” as our
culture likes to call it. They are, if the sexual liberationists are right,
just two of the victims of lingering religious taboos that continue to impede
our progress to complete sexual liberation. All that matters is that they loved
one another!

And
yet, even if this barrier of religious “taboo” is overcome, we still will
not have achieved complete liberation. Since consent is all that
matters, it must be asked — and indeed is being asked among the
hyper-sophisticated in major universities — why our narrow Christianity-ridden
culture is still so hagridden with homocentrism that it is not able to open
itself to the splendor of more earth-affirming pagan cultures, which once celebrated
sexual union not merely with members of our own species, but with others, as
well! If we are going to throw out all that repressed Levitical stuff about
homosexual acts, why on earth are we allowing it a say in what a man and his
sheep might want to do in the privacy of their own barn?

Who
is society to impose its views on those who find such a relationship
fulfilling?

The normal response by advocates of
same-sex “marriage” to all this is: “That will never happen.” In this
they sound exactly like abortion supporters back in the ’70s, scoffing that it
would never lead to euthanasia. But in reality, the only “argument” our present
culture has against any of these developments is “Eww!” because we have no conception of what
constitutes the good beyond “consent.” Make that the sole criterion — and every
one of these developments is not only perfectly logical, but virtually
inevitable.

“And
so what if they are?” asks the post-Christian. What indeed? Next week we shall
explore “So what?”

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